By Peter Robinson.
Then their cries, redoubled at dawn,
recall for me a single seagull
drunkenly veering across
flagstones on Addington Road.
White wings outstretched to get airborne,
it was lunging down for food scraps
outside the crescent shops.
I thought: like Baudelaire’s albatross
those giant wings impede its walking
or, injured, it can’t fly …
But, no, up it flew above slate housetops
as if, that quandary outsoared,
now it could make back towards its seaboard
breeding grounds and sky.
♦
Peter Robinson‘s most recent collection of poems is The Returning Sky (Shearsman Books), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2012. In 2013 he published Foreigners, Drunks and Babies: Eleven Stories
Portfolio: This is one of six new poems published in June 2013 in the Fortnightly Review.
